Comment

Poor people, poor homes

It's official. There is one architecture for those with the freedom to choose, another for those for whom a roof over their heads is a matter of all but choiceless necessity. The debate over quality, or lack of it, in the development of mass housing in sweeping tracts of southern England has been fuelled by Cabe, the government's Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment. Its chief executive, Richard Simmons, wrote in the Guardian: "Our challenge is to create the kind of neighbourhoods that people will want to live in. This is not a question of aesthetics or style."

Oh yes it is. I would have thought that Simmons's job was to champion the way buildings and the "built environment" look. However, as he was referring to new housing estates, or "sustainable communities" in New Labour-speak, in the Thames Gateway, a tragic fiction of a non-place in the profitable making, I suppose we must learn to forgive him.

For this stretch of sopping, strangely beautiful land along the banks of the Thames has become the dumping ground of crass new housing for poor people, many of them migrants, employed to clean up the costly messes we make in our homes, offices and public lavatories, and to stick expensive tickets on the windscreens of our cars. This is a no-go area for such trivial things as aesthetics, civility or style.

Such foppish concerns should surely be left to the educated, affluent middle classes. Let them choose beautifully designed homes in effete Edinburgh, bathetic Bath or the languorous squares of Kensington or Pimlico. No-nonsense Thames Gateway folk deserve something different: architecture and planning innocent of aesthetics, stripped of style. Given that many of them will have come from some of the poorest towns and villages in the world, why should they care about the way their houses or the buildings around them look?

In any case, the vibrant, accessible - and not forgetting sustainable - "environment" they will live in is all about "delivering" tens of thousands of new homes as free from architecture as possible. To date there is not a single decent new housing development in what the government, and those in hock to it, insists on calling the Thames Gateway. There are few trains or schools or anywhere to go - but that's another story.

Quite why government ministers and Simmons insist on "delivering" homes in the Thames Gateway is a patronising mystery. Homes are nurtured from houses, and houses are designed and built from the ground up. They are not delivered like pints of milk once were. The very word suggests some government milkman from Quango Dairies plonking design-free houses down in bleak, marshy landscapes, then waiting for poor, huddled masses to touch the forelock as they cross their thresholds, while thanking Cabe that the delivery of their homes came free of embarrassing aesthetics or unmentionable style.

Imagine Bath, or Edinburgh, or another exceptionally good-looking city or town, re-dressed to address Cabe criteria for housing design. Away with those preening porticoes. Lower those unnecessarily high ceilings. Uproot those aristocratic geometric squares and line the houses, newly detached from one another, along serpentine cul-de-sacs unknown to public transport.

Architecture of the very highest calibre, a matter of aesthetics as well as planning, functionality, common sense and all the rest, should be available to everyone. Few traditional societies live style-free lives. Much modern urban society does. Fey though this will seem to tough-talking, self-righteous politicians and their placemen, I think many of us would hope that the government's commission for architecture might just have a jargon-free word to say in favour of the way our houses, our homes, look.